WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 666: The Madman Swinging a Hammer

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Enkrid's gaze shifted to Esther's eyes. Her pupils burned with heat, and her hair rippled despite the still air.

What's wrong with her.

"And I never cut in line. Big Eyes, one more."

Mixed into Esther's breath, alongside the scent of the night sky, was something else. A sweetish, heavy smokiness.

"Yes, yes."

Krais had already produced a bottle that smelled faintly of burnt sugar and poured it into the cup Esther held out. Smooth on the nose, but high proof.

"This is the liquor we received as a gift from the Elf City," Krais said as he poured.

Sinar added, "It's brewed from five different fruits with morning dew worked into it. The name is Tintilas Wyr. In the common tongue it means something like seeping poison, or mist that approaches without a sound. Something along those lines."

Strong liquor, then.

"I am not drunk. Do not worry. The Glint spell is like a sorcerer's secret. One's arcane vision is not shown to just anyone. Sinar, it is good to have you back."

She's drunk. Enkrid was certain of it.

"Drunk? I am not drunk. Why are you looking at me like that? The night sky is spinning and spinning. Could today be the day the world ends? Are the stars falling to shatter everything? If so, I cannot stay here like this. Enki, come with me. We must find somewhere to shelter for a while."

Definitely drunk.

"Is there no place for me?" Krais asked with a grin, cutting in. He seemed to find Esther adorable.

"You claw thief."

Esther threw a fist without warning. Krais had trained his body well enough to react, bending back at the waist to dodge. The air split with a clean whoosh.

If that had landed, it would have broken bones at minimum. Esther looked slender, but there was a panther's strength in that hand.

She had said so herself. A benefit gained from transforming into a Lake Panther, she'd called it.

"Not the face."

But what Krais said as he dodged was something else entirely.

So anywhere else is fine?

"Why not the face?"

Rem had been listening. He swallowed the chunk of meat he'd been chewing and asked. Eating like that, his mouth should have been smeared with grease, but Rem was surprisingly neat about it.

Come to think of it, he really is full of surprises.

Sharper than he looked, and he enjoyed laying out schemes with a sly kind of pleasure. Even when he made someone's life difficult, he did it with calculation.

'When he killed nobles, he wasn't killing just anyone.'

He had picked only those who were truly beyond saving, building his infamy on purpose.

Through that, he made sure only the genuinely malicious held grudges against him alone.

Watching him eat neatly now was another surprise. A side of him probably shown only to the people in this group.

Well, that was just what Enkrid found himself thinking as he watched.

"Unlike Rem, I have a face worth maintaining," Krais said, edging gradually away from Esther. Did he even know what he was saying?

That was where Krais's own surprises showed. Someone who normally calculated everything and prepared for every angle, and yet in moments like this he said something brainless.

Like right now, he clearly knew how Rem would react to a comment like that, and yet the words came out as if he hadn't thought at all.

"Me?"

Rem shot back. The smile at the corner of his mouth was unsettling. Bleak enough to snuff out a campfire.

"...The finest-looking man the west has ever produced, of course."

Krais tried to smooth it over.

"Too late, you bastard. Tonight I'm going to make your face considerably more rugged."

Rem drew a bone-handled dagger as he said it. Whatever its origin, the thing radiated an ominous air.

"Hey, hey, don't do this. Ragna, Audin, Captain, Captain!"

Krais ducked behind the campfire. The flames swayed sideways, stretching and reaching as if with hands.

Sinar watched the fire shift and murmured to herself, her expression blank.

"It's all right now. It's all right."

The demon's fire was gone. She knew that. But a mark once burned in doesn't fade easily.

"Where's Bran?"

Enkrid asked, watching the brief commotion. Sinar answered quickly.

"Won't quit tobacco. A Woodguard who smokes, can you believe it?"

It wasn't hard to believe. Less so now that he knew why Bran lit up.

"I'll step out for some night air. Big Eyes, a few knife scars on the face are fine."

Ragna stood and said it, and Krais bristled.

"You don't have a single scar on your face."

"That's because there was nobody around worth leaving one."

Ragna was usually a man of few words. He moved as though the world were a constant inconvenience. And yet among these people he talked more, and you rarely caught him being lazy. Ragna's own kind of surprise.

"That's a rather unlucky thing to say. Save it for in front of the unit sometime, people have been getting slack lately," Ropord said after hearing Ragna. Fell, beside him, grumbled about something or other before tilting a whole bottle of the expensive elf liquor into his mouth.

"Hey, if you drink all of that yourself, I'm cutting open your stomach to take some back."

Rem said something brutal at the sight of it, and Audin simply grabbed Fell by the throat and pulled the bottle free.

Fell resisted on instinct and got hit for it.

"Divine punishment," Audin said.

No, that was just violence. Audin.

They couldn't send Ragna out alone, so Ropord stood and followed. In the meantime, Enkrid tasted the liquor Krais had brought.

Strong.

But a sweet and slightly sour note threaded through the heavy weight of it and lit up his tongue.

You might call it a drink where the flavor reaches you before any sense of its strength does, fitting enough for a name like "seeping poison."

Liquor this potent, it made sense that Esther had drunk herself into the ground.

"I shall save them. Do not worry. Idiots," Esther muttered from where she lay. Her robe had spread wide at some point, thick as a heavy blanket, but she still looked cold.

He'd need to bring a cloak and drape it over her later.

"Strong stuff. Use it as a drink of celebration?"

Sinar came around to his side and sat.

"Celebrate what?"

He'd half expected another throwaway joke, but..."That you have claimed for yourself the shape of what you wished to be."

Maybe it was the sight of the flickering fire. Whatever the reason, Sinar spoke without any hint of a joke, in the tone of someone saying exactly what needed to be said.

Enkrid had once looked at a peace built on the sword and talked about what that peace was worth.

He had also thought, more than once, that the people around him were the very company he had dreamed of.

But if he were honest with himself, the truth was simpler. He simply liked right now.

Standing beside these lunatics. Being able to protect the ones at his back. Carrying his will into a fight and stepping forward. He liked all of it, genuinely.

"Rest sometimes. Give the difficult thoughts a rest," Sinar said. She added "in my arms" after that, but he ignored it.

Enkrid ate, drank, and slept. Then he dreamed.

"The weather is lovely. Let me tell you an old story today. It'll be quite fun, I think. A tale about an elf who loved to joke."

An old woman who had once sold herself to survive had found peace, settling a grandchild on her lap to share a story.

"Business is hard, but when I see my kid's face, somehow I find the energy."

A fruit seller thought of his wife and child as he pulled his cart.

In a flower field, a shy young man and a young woman whispered to each other, and a soldier on guard duty complained that he hadn't had any work lately and was getting a gut.

The baker watched and nagged him to get up early and run.

The guard said his father should go do that himself, and the baker father replied that his father was busy every morning baking bread, and if the boy hated it, he could quit and come bake bread instead.

In the dream, not one person worried about the Demon Creatures moving beyond the village edge, or feared that the fires of war would reach them someday and burn everything down.

There were no bandits stealing what they had. The lord was genuinely wondering whether maintaining the walls was even necessary.

Enkrid watched them and took up his sword. More precisely, he took it up outside the city where they lived.

Peace and tranquility would not come just by lying back and patting your belly.

The knight who ends this war!
The knight who dyes war in twilight!
We name him the Knight of Twilight!
The knight of War's End!
The final knight! The knight who ends the strife!

The traveling bard's song closed the dream, and he woke.

Enkrid rose before dawn and began training. By morning, Esther pieced together what she remembered from the night before, let out a silent scream, and did not return to her quarters for two days.

Soldiers heading out to the mountain range posts said they heard strange cries coming from the peaks. Mixed in were the shrieks of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts.

"She sure vents in style," Rem said.

Enkrid just smiled. A few more days passed, and a summons came from Aetri. He wanted him to come to the smithy.

Enkrid heard the news and felt his heart pick up with anticipation. Not an Inscribed Weapon, but something close to one, Aetri had said. That alone was enough to make the wait unbearable.

The moment morning training ended, he cut across the city in the early hours and headed for the smithy.

"You're here."

Aetri greeted him as if he'd been waiting. The smithy's heat pushed back against the cool blue air of dawn, and Aetri sat within it, his assistant in a cloth hood standing at his side.

"Do you know about the three great metals of the continent?"

Enkrid gave a slight nod in greeting. That was the question Aetri offered in return.

"I don't."

He shook his head.

People tend to know well the things they care about. Enkrid had picked up vague knowledge of Valerian Steel, true silver, and hardest iron here and there through passing conversation, but beyond that, nothing.

The assistant brought a chair, and Enkrid sat. Two cups of tea steamed gently on the table.

Aetri set a cloth-wrapped oblong piece on the table and spoke.

"Hardest iron came from the eastern pyrite deposits in the Uber Mountain range, and true silver came from the iron mines at Lewes. You probably know that both are just names, not actual gold or silver."

That much he knew. He nodded, and Aetri continued.

"And from the Valerian mines, something called true iron appears rarely. Its color is a dark blue-black. Usually when hardness increases, brittleness follows and the metal shatters easily, but Valerian true iron doesn't have that weakness. And they say that when you smelt down a meteorite fallen from the sky, meteorite iron is what you find inside."

Enkrid listened closely, trying to work out the point, and thought he was beginning to see it.

"The armor you brought in had meteorite iron mixed through it. And the other metal was the philosopher's stone, what some call living metal."

The first weapon Enkrid had received was made of hardest iron. The next, true silver.

What was in his hand now was Penna, a sword that an elf blacksmith had personally ground and tempered from moonsilver, a material drawn from true silver with special properties.

Aetri's eyes showed his enthusiasm.

A scholar risks everything for truth. A knight becomes consumed by swordsmanship.

Then what about a craftsman? And not just any craftsman, but one taking on a challenge unlike any before him. What mattered most to someone like that?

What he desired might shift a little from time to time. But what Aetri desired right now, Enkrid thought he understood.

"You want me to get you true iron."

"Yes."

Aetri answered without drawing a single breath. Like a sword drawn so fast you never see the motion, the blade already at your throat before you register it. That fast, that unguarded.

What the craftsman before him wanted was material.

"Say that plainly next time."

"Yes. I'll do that from now on."

It wasn't that he had wanted to speak in circles, exactly.

'Aetri is enjoying this too.'

Enjoying the process of forging an Inscribed Weapon. Not seeing the present as suffering or despair.

And that was right.

A madman who swings the hammer, savoring every step.

'That's you.'

That was how Enkrid defined him. Had Aetri heard it, he'd have fixed Enkrid with a deeply unsettled look.

Whether the suspense had run its course, Aetri returned to his usual plain manner. He unwound the rolled cloth on the table.

"I can see the path forward to some extent. You could call this the first trial I have to pass. Are you satisfied with the shape?"

Seeing the path forward meant knowing how to forge an Inscribed Weapon. Calling it a trial while asking about the shape meant this form was being fixed as the final one.

Penna was a short sword with an edge on only one side. He had used it well, all the same, from the moment it settled into his grip, once he'd grown accustomed to it, he could turn its cutting power into a weapon in its own right.

Even Rem had let out small complaints every time his axe met Penna.

"A bit more of this and my axe is going to start feeling insulted," he had said.

Ragna had been blunter, flat-out telling him it was time to find a new sword.

"I'm going to step out and fetch a sword."

"Where?"

"There's a place. One like that."

Not naming a destination and going off alone was the same as announcing he planned never to be seen again.

"We've agreed to call that not a journey but a farewell, Ragna," Krais had said from beside him, and it matched exactly what Enkrid was thinking.

In the end, Ragna didn't go.

"Well, the way back is a little unclear to me."

Hearing that made sending him even less of an option.

Ragna of all people said he wasn't sure of the way. Which meant he could leave on foot, drift on a boat, and drown in the sea, and no one would have a word to say about it.

Regardless. Penna was that kind of weapon. Finding something better suited to him would not be easy.

Enkrid reached out and gripped the handle of the sword on the table.

The pommel wrapped in clean brown leather was simple in form. Diamond-shaped, coming to a point at the end.

The blade near the ricasso was left unsharpened, and the guard was a plain straight line, no pattern, no embellishment of any kind.

"The tip is hardest iron, the blade is mixed with true silver, and the core is meteorite iron."

The philosopher's stone had been melted down and used to blend the three metals together.

The blade was long, closer to a two-handed sword than a one-handed one. The grip matched that length.

The blade's thickness was on the heavier side, like a spatha.

Overall the form was that of a two-handed sword, though using it in one hand would not be impossible.

With a knight's strength, you could swing a cudgel made from five maces melted together.

And Enkrid, even among knights, was exceptional in raw strength.

"I love it. Couldn't ask for more."

Enkrid said it. A thought came to him, the kind people described when they'd only glimpsed a face from across a room and fallen for it on the spot.

That was Enkrid now. Magnificent in form alone. Without even gauging the balance, it was exactly the ideal he had been carrying in his head.

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